In online gaming, game hosting services and game developers have created a number of ways to track and personalize the online gaming experience. One drawback of existing systems is that many of the features have grown up independent of each other. Games send blobs of data about gamers back and forth to a central service, but the service has no way to understand and aggregate the data outside of the game context. Games can host their own Websites, but the data displayed there is not universally accessible to other games. Moreover the service collects its own information about gamers but has no unified process for integrating it with what is happening in the midst of game play.
In a sense, then, the service and games offer two parallel communities that offer great—but separated—resources for gamers. First, in the game community, while playing a game, the gamer can see the community of others who play the specific game, the leaderboards for that game, and his personal achievements in that game. A game can tell a gamer, from the Service data, if a Friend is online, but it can't tell the gamer what, exactly that Friend is doing on the Service or when he will be available. When the game disk is removed, the whole game community disappears from the console, and the gamer's achievements become unreadable.
Second, in the service community, the service knows a gamer's history, all of the games he's played, the amount of time he spends online, the size of his Friends list and all of the games that Friends have played or are playing, the Friends invites sent and received, the Messages sent and received, and all of the Feedback the gamer has given and received. For the gamer, this data manifests as community on the console or PC, but much of it is invisible once the game disk is inserted or the game program is started.